Elections

· ·2 min read

Nominations open for the presidency, with the Senate's arithmetic riding on it

Twenty-four hours to declare, and a nomination format quietly rewritten after a fortnight of placeholder trouble. The winner decides whether the Civil Liberties Party's four-seat bloc means anything at all.

Nominations are open for the presidency. Candidates have twenty-four hours to declare, on the Reddit post: 174th Presidential Election: Call for Candidates.

The Electoral Commissioner has changed how the nomination format is presented — a change made, in the Commissioner’s words, “following last week’s events”. Candidates are told it should not affect them, with a caveat attached:

The paper has some sympathy for the qualification. Two weeks ago the template’s placeholder Reddit username turned out to belong to a real, thirteen-year-old account whose owner had been pinged enough times to ask, politely, that it stop. At the senatorial ballot that followed, the Commissioner’s own guidance to voters was to watch for the two candidates who never replaced their placeholder statements.

How the presidency is counted

Not the way the Senate is. The Senate uses Threshold Equal Approval, which spends ballot weight as seats are filled and can leave a chamber elected at three different bars. The presidency is a single seat and uses STAR.

Every ballot scores every candidate from 0 to 5. The two highest totals go through to an automatic runoff, and the runoff asks one question only: of those two, which did each ballot score higher? Whoever more voters preferred wins. Nothing else about the scores matters at that point — a candidate can lead comfortably on total score and lose the runoff to someone more voters ranked above them.

If the runoff ties, the tiebreak walks down total scores and then the count of each score. If everything ties, it ends in chance.

What rides on it

More than usual. The Senate elected on 2 August has eleven seats, and overriding a presidential veto takes eight of them. The Civil Liberties Party holds three seats and backed a fourth member elected as an independent — four, which is exactly the number needed to make eight impossible.

That arithmetic only bites while the CLP also holds the presidency. A veto is what the blocking four are there to protect; without one, four votes block nothing and the other seven can legislate as they please.

The presidency is therefore not merely the executive this cycle. It is the difference between a Senate that can be stopped and a Senate that cannot.